Phases of the Moon
by Panuru
Summary: Lulu and Chappu's untold story. (Incomplete and static).


Author's Note: I've wanted to write the untold story of Lulu and Chappu's relationship for a while now, but today I was inspired to give it a good kick-off. Since the only pay-off of fanfiction is readers' enjoyment, I'll see what kind of responses I get before I put more effort into this thing.  
  
Since there isn't much information at all about Chappu, I inferred a lot about him. If anyone finds anything not fitting with the information given in the game, feel free to let me know.  
  
Lulu will be out-of-character in much of this fic, and there's a good reason for that, so don't think I'm unjustly writing her as a frigid bitch.  
  
Enjoy.  
  


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Phases of the Moon by Panuru (savannah_lynn_b@yahoo.com)  
  
Chapter One: New Moon  
  
At the waterfall the day faded like a coal dropped into the little pool, with a smokey hiss of the heat still stirring in the air. The rocks were washed blue, retreating from the different colors of the day into varying shades of the sky. Hanging just below the road that led into the village and sprinkled with the sand that trickled from the brush of the feet that regularly walked over it, the scene was romantic but not secluded enough for the nocturnal meetings of Besaid teenagers. Instead, they tended to huddle into the little shadows of rock crevices at the shore, sounds muffled by the purr of the ocean. They were all bursting like red flowers in the bloom of their sexuality, scattered around in a flushing population, growing all over the island in such numbers that Lulu could hardly avoid them sometimes, like the red moss that was thick and velvety in some places. She herself had seemed to crumble inward instead of blossoming, however– a sexless creature, not because she was too ugly to be invited there, but because her disposition answered all notions of such invitations for her. Having made the mistake that girls sometimes make, she had tried so hard not to become a shallow male-accessory of a girl that it gave young men the impression that she didn't want anything to do with males, and in the protectiveness of their egos they avoided her. Lulu pretended that this had been her intention, or at the very least that she didn't care, because she hadn't much choice.  
  
This was the simple explanation as to why she was climbing down the side of the waterfall alone, but to someone who was not familiar with her position in Besaid adolescent society, she would look like a lunar goddess, skin polished in the white liquid glow of moonlight.  
  
Chappu watched her from the other side of the pond, at first because he didn't recognize her, and then because he did and couldn't believe that it was her. He had never given her much thought before– she was younger than Wakka and older than him, unfamiliar to him except that her rigidness was famous, and a catchall among the teenage male community for their budding snide defense reaction to female allusiveness. She was called Witch and Ice Queen, and where these names had always made her into an outcast before, he suddenly found himself relating them to a kind of fairytale feminine mystery about her.  
  
Lulu unloaded an armful of vials and bottles onto a flat surface of rock at the bottom of the waterfall, settling to her knees beside them before spreading them out neatly. In Chappu's enchantment with her, he mistook them for things much more magical and exotic than hair dye. He watched her curl forward and rake her hair over her head with her fingers to dip it into the water below. The place where the pool caught the waterfall made her hair swirl around in inky vines, and when she swung her head from the water the beads slung from her hair winked white in the moonlight like jewels. Chappu crouched, resting a knee on his blitzball, to watch as Lulu dug a rust-red paste from one of the bottles, caking it on her fingers and then spreading it. She was lifting it to her hair when he stood up and started walking, as if he were just passing the place on his way to somewhere else.  
  
"Hey, what're you doing?"  
  
Lulu's form snapped toward him, her expression startled before it settled into icy irritation. To her he was another one of the faceless teenagers sprinkled all over Besaid like vibrant, hollow seashells.  
  
"What do you want?" she said, not returning to her task yet, in order to give him the full sting of her disdain.  
  
"What are you doing– dying your hair, ya?"  
  
Her top lip hooked a little and she turned. She had learned by now that the thing that annoyed them most was to show them that their opinions held no validity.  
  
"Hey," he said, stepping to the edge of the road and bending forward to look down at her,holding the blitzball at his hip. "You shouldn't do that here. It puts things in the water, and I like your hair the way it is, anyway."  
  
At this Lulu spun around again with a spite that burned through her intention of icy indifference, expecting to have to summon the energy to fight off a whole troupe of boys behind him, faces agape as they waited for the punch-line. Instead she found still only Chappu, and projected that energy singularly onto him.  
  
"Why don't you mind your own business and go back to your little beach games?"  
  
Chappu laughed resiliently, bobbing like a bright buoy in her dark waters. "Chill out, ya? I'm only sayin'– you look better with it dark. Why'd you wanna look like everyone else, anyway?"  
  
Lulu had not expected this insight, and she was both irritated that she had underestimated him and harshly unadjusted to the threat of someone's intelligence comparing to her own. She had no defense against his lack of illusion.  
  
"I like your hair the way it is," he said again, bronze shoulders rising and dropping in a shrug.  
  
Lulu sat helplessly on her knees looking up at him, not able to admit to trying to conform byfinishing what she was doing or to admit defeat to him by withdrawing from it. His cockiness was quicker to take advantage of the moment than his attraction to her was.  
  
"I figure if you like to stand out so much, just keep your dark hair instead of dying it like everyone else's."  
  
"Oh, shut up," she snapped. "Don't think you've reached any new level of intelligence just because you discussed something that doesn't involve a scoreboard."  
  
"I won't, as long as you don't think you're any dumber for talkin' to me, ya?" he said cheerfully, and bounced the blitzball against the sand as he walked, crossing over the waterfall and then going past it, toward the village. He disappeared from her view behind the white spray of the waterfall as if withdrawing behind a curtain from a performance.  
  
The first time Lulu had spoken to Chappu had been like the sting of warming frostbitten fingers over a fireplace. 


End file.
